


Day Three: Graveyard/Zombie

by Euphorion



Series: Writober [3]
Category: Kuroko no Basuke | Kuroko's Basketball
Genre: M/M, Zombies, bc he's a zombie, no character death but a character is technically dead
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-03
Updated: 2016-10-03
Packaged: 2018-08-19 09:43:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,417
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8200502
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Euphorion/pseuds/Euphorion
Summary: Hayama shoved his hands deeper into the pockets of his hoodie, wishing he could safely take out his facial piercings in winter without the holes closing up. It was only late October and already they stung like a bitch in the chill air. The mist—could it even be called that? Something this thick seemed to demand the word fog or maybe, like, death blanket—didn’t help, it seemed to seep through his clothes and even his skin to pull him downward, through the damp leaves and loam and into dark, sleeping soil.





	

Hayama shoved his hands deeper into the pockets of his hoodie, wishing he could safely take out his facial piercings in winter without the holes closing up. It was only late October and already they stung like a bitch in the chill air. The mist—could it even be called that? Something this thick seemed to demand the word _fog_ or maybe, like, _death blanket_ —didn’t help, it seemed to seep through his clothes and even his skin to pull him downward, through the damp leaves and loam and into dark, sleeping soil.

He knew his way pretty well at this point, which was lucky. At one point he paused between large crosses, unsure of which way to go, but then caught sight of a dark, skeleton hand, emerging from the mist at his left. He started, and then realized it was the leafless branches of a tree he knew. He kept on.

He’d almost reached his destination when he heard the voices. He crouched behind a nearby gravestone to listen.

“This was his favorite kind of weather,” someone—a male voice—was saying. “It’s just as well we didn’t get here earlier, when the sun was out. Wouldn’t have felt right, you know?”

Another boy chuckled. “Yeah, he might pop up and tell us we were early. We’d ruined his surprise.”

“Don’t say that, please,” said a third voice, this one a girl. “On a night like tonight I might actually believe it.”

There was a sigh from someone, and then the first voice said softly, “we miss you.”

A few more silent moments, and then footsteps, three sets, that passed by Hayama’s hiding place. He peered over the gravestone to see three figures moving off into the mist in a close-knit clump. The girl lead, holding the hand of a very tall boy with light brown hair. Third—lingering, glancing over his shoulder—was a slightly shorter boy with darker hair and glasses.

“Happy birthday,” he muttered, and then jogged to catch up with the other two.

Hayama waited long enough to be certain they were gone, and then he walked the way they’d come.

When he reached Izuki’s gravestone he paused for a second. Someone had left him flowers—yellow roses. He shook his head and swung off his heavy backpack, glad he’d discarded his own flower plan as too—whatever. Too much.

He took a breath, then knocked a knuckle on Izuki’s headstone. “Hey,” he said softly. “It’s me.”

The earth beneath the flowers shifted, and a hand—this one neither skeletal nor secretly a tree branch, almost human if it weren’t for the blackened nails and greyish cast to the skin—thrust itself through the earth, followed slowly by the rest of a body. Izuki blew dirt from his chalk-white lips and shook it from his hair, hauling himself up out of the grave to sit at its edge, only his feet remaining in the earth. 

Hayama looked at him for a minute. It was a fascinating experience. He’d found it sickening at first—the places where Izuki no longer had flesh, and his ribs sometimes caught the light; the part of his cheek where his skin was ragged over sinew and bone, but it was amazing the things the human brain can normalize, when exposed to them for long enough. Now, more often than not, he found himself noticing the things he would notice about a human boy—the shape of his slightly milky eyes; the line of his jaw.

Finally he settled down, cross-legged, at Izuki’s side. “Why didn’t you come out?” he asked. “They set you up for it so well.”

Izuki smiled a crooked smile, a little off. “Hyuuga always was the best straight man,” he acknowledged, and then his smile got a little more real. “In the joke sense, obviously. Not the other one.”

Hayama frowned at him. He was evading. “You don’t want them to know you’re alive?”

Izuki raised barely-there eyebrows at him. “I’m not alive,” he pointed out. He looked away from Hayama’s face, picking up the flowers. Slowly—it was hard for him to do things that required much fine motor skill—he began to pluck the petals from one of the roses. “They love me,” he said softly, “they love me not. They love me, they love me not. They _loved_ me—” He stripped all the petals off and let them trickle out of his fingers like sand, finally meeting Hayama’s eyes again. “And maybe that’s how it should stay.”

Hayama shook his head. “They still do,” he said, “or they wouldn’t be here.”

Izuki propped his head on his palm. “And you? Why are you here?”

Hayama felt himself flush, and hoped the moonlight filtering through the fog would wash him out enough that Izuki didn’t notice. “I brought you something.” He rummaged through his backpack and pulled out a bottle. “Since it’s your birthday and all.”

“Is it?” Izuki said, eyes wide. “I’d forgotten, you lose track of days.”

Hayama made a face at him, not believing that for a minute. He knew for a fact that Izuki could hear very well the kind of stuff said around his grave. But he was distracted, as he undid the little wire holding on the champagne cork, by another terrible thought. “Hang on,” he said, “fuck, can you even drink stuff?”

Izuki shrugged, little clumps of grave dirt rolling off his shoulders. “Don’t know,” he said. “Haven’t tried.”

Hayama popped the champagne, the noise making him jump a little. Izuki raised a hand to his lips. “Shh! You’ll wake the dead with that racket.”

Hayama laughed at him, took a sip of the champagne, and laughed again, nearly choking on the bubbles. Izuki accepted the bottle from him, his eyes a dancing, moonlight blue.

He could drink, it turned out, though he took small sips and didn’t actually seem to get drunk. Hayama was careful to wipe the mouth of the bottle every time it was passed to him. He struggled to think of Izuki as properly dead, but that didn’t mean he was going to take unnecessary risks.

He ended up drinking most of the champagne himself, leaning his head sideways against Izuki’s headstone. They talked about nothing, and everything. Hayama’s life, his friends, his team. His worries about graduation at the end of the year and whether or not he would even want to continue to play basketball without Reo and Nebuya and even Akashi. They talked about the siblings Izuki had overheard get into a fight last week over their grandmother’s grave because they couldn’t agree on exactly how she’d died. Izuki seemed to find this funny; Hayama, even warmed through with champagne and good company, couldn’t find it anything but sad.

Izuki ran a hand through what was left of his hair, seeing his expression. “Sorry,” he said wickedly. “Gallows humor.”

By the time Hayama got up to go home his limbs were stiff with cold and damp and sitting in the same position too long. The fog was lifting—it was not yet dawn, but perhaps the inward breath before it. He tried to remember, muzzily, when the witching hour was supposed to be, but it escaped him. Besides, no witches here. It would have to be, like. The Zombieing hour, and he supposed he could decide whenever the hell that was himself, as. Inventor, or whatever.

“Hey,” he said to Izuki, leaning down to grab the empty bottle from the ground. “You should come to Reo’s Halloween party next week. Everyone will think you just have an awesome costume.”

Izuki smiled at him. “Thank you,” he said, his voice unusually sincere. “That’s a really nice thought.”

Hayama nodded, straightening up. “Yeah, well,” he said. “Think. On that thought. I’ll come back and see you before then.”

Izuki nodded back, hesitated, and then said, “Hayama.”  
Hayama paused in swinging his backpack up onto his shoulders. Izuki plucked a rose from the bouquet on his grave, offering it up to him. “For coming to see me,” he said.

Hayama accepted it. “Oh,” he said, around the beat of his heart. “Yeah.” He played with the stem of the rose. “Hey,” he said, “flowers have, like. Meanings, and stuff, right?” He kept quiet about the fact that the only reason he knew that was because he’d thought about bringing some today. “What do yellow roses mean?”

Izuki looked up at him. “Friendship and joy,” he said, “and new beginnings.”


End file.
